NEW DELHI: The media reports on the rioters invading the Presidential Palace, Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court are very disturbing and are cause for deep concern worldwide, said Prashant Kumar, Convenor of BRICS Legal Forum (India Chapter) and the President, the Bar Association of India.

BRICS Legal Forum India Chapter called upon the Prime Minister of India as the host of the G 20 for this year to galvanise the member countries to take the strengthening of the Rule of Law in its true sense.

In a statement, Kumar said after the incidents in the US Capitol on 2nd April 2021, a repeat in Brazil on Sunday not only deserves outright condemnation but requires a call for concerted action to prevent the spread of such tendencies as a contagion to wreck and negate the very notion and institutions of the Rule of Law and democracy even in jurisdictions where it is taken to be firmly accepted and established. 

The physical assault on the Supreme Court in Brasilia bears extremely serious portends for the sustenance of the Rule of Law globally, especially in the background of the rise of phenomenon in the last decades where the outcomes of electoral democracy are aggressively pursued by political players by appealing to their core constituents to the specific and professed exclusion and detriment of others who bear a different social, religious, racial, economic or ideological profile.

The Incidents in Brazil apparently are the outcome of the failure on the electoral front of such an enterprise and inability to accept such outcome by those who bear such a mindset created through the exclusionary electoral appeals made by political players and parties and their supporters.

The assault on the judiciary further evidences that the established practice and available constitutional recourses through an independent judicial process are being discarded in favour of violence, vandalism and anarchy which strikes a death knell to the very notion of the Rule of Law. BRICS Legal Forum India Chapter calls upon the Prime Minister of India as the host of the G 20 for this year to galvanise the member countries to take the strengthening of the Rule of Law in its true sense on the top of the G 20 agenda, especially given the credentials of India as world’s biggest Rule of Law based democracy with uninterrupted transition of power through electoral process since India became independent and being home to one of the world’s most independent, active and robust judiciaries, it said.

BRICS Legal Forum India Chapter calls upon the Prime Minister of India as the host of the G 20 for this year to galvanise the member countries to take the strengthening of the Rule of Law in its true sense on the top of the G 20 agenda, especially given the credentials of India as world’s biggest Rule of Law based democracy with uninterrupted transition of power through electoral process since India became independent and being home to one of the world’s most independent, active and robust judiciaries, the statement added.

[Read Statement]